‘My Voice Will Always Be of This Place’

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The first story I ever wrote outside of a classroom (I was likely around age eight or nine) was set in coastal Maine. My protagonist lived in a lighthouse. I had never been to Maine, nor been in a lighthouse. It didn’t matter. I wrote in pencil, in a glossy pink hardbound journal. I thought I was doing something important.

I remember stopping after a short time because I couldn’t see what would happen next. I couldn’t visualize how a character would move about her space or what she might see outside her window. I remember thinking Man, this writing stuff is hard.

I was born and raised, and still live today, just on the outskirts of Cherokee, North Carolina—a place technically called Qualla, but it is more an extension of other communities. Over 1,000 miles from the state of Maine, this is the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Don’t argue with me—THE HEART. 

I grew up knowing waterfalls and Blackberry winters. I swam in the Oconaluftee River with my cousins all summer and listened by campfires to ghost stories of Spearfinger and the Brown Mountain lights. It turns out, I had all I needed outside my own window to become a storyteller, though it took far too long to recognize it.

It wasn’t until my mother handed me a book by a Native American author when I was in middle school that I came to understand that this place was special enough for stories—that readers might care about what happens in native communities. It wasn’t until that book that I realized my real voice, my own observations would make this writing stuff, though never easy, not so hard after all. 

I believe narrative voice is intimately linked to place. That is not to say that one must always write about their hometown, but that there is a quality of one’s hometown in their voice, their worldview, their lens. When I write, I want to capture the complexities of place. I want to go beyond the travel guides and examine how humans exist in their environment with each other.

Cherokee, North Carolina, has long been a strip of tourists gift shops and roadside dances for the outside cultural consumer. As of late, the lucky seven lights of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino have added to the landscape as well. Those snapshots are certainly imbedded in our story—in our voices, but so are tribal politics, extended family gatherings, and new generations learning and modernizing ancient art forms such as pottery and wood carving. I believe you have to quite literally immerse yourself in the waters and walk the trails deep into the woods to truly understand this place. It is rare that I don’t take a walk, or at least step outside and smell the air in the midst of writing. 

Like a lot of writers I know, most of my story-crafting happens off the page, away from my laptop. As of late, I have taken up mountain biking, and I use the trails as a form of plot diagraming or storyboarding. There is something naturally compatible between the slow climb of a mountain and rising action of a story. If I am doing it right, my readers will grip the edges of a book through its final pages in much the same way I white-knuckle my way through a downhill ridge line descent. I may not be writing a story about mountain biking, but I am writing about the way in which our bodies interact with our natural spaces—how our home’s landscape informs our character, memories, and values.

Stories grow differently in different places. If I had stayed with the lighthouse idea, it may have been a story that wound its way up a spiral staircase; but I had no way of recognizing the natural rhythms of such. Even if I had been much older and more experienced, I suspect my lack of familiarity with that distinct space would leave a reader with only superficial sense of story, not an immersive experience.

When I was four years old and a Sesame Street enthusiast, I spotted a King Cobra lying in wait behind one of our strawberry plant wooden barrels while I was playing school. Of course, it wasn’t a cobra; my dad killed a Copperhead later that day. As it turns out, Sesame Street had featured reptiles from around the world in that morning’s episode. So, apparently in the time between Big Bird greeting me on the screen and me setting a playdate with my pretend friends, I had convinced myself that it was entirely likely that a King Cobra had made its way to my backyard. I told my parents such.

And that’s the other thing about stories seated in place. It doesn’t mean the landscape never changes or that strangers never interact with the locals. Community, like culture, is always changing and growing. Some writers may feel stifled by “writing what you know,” but in my experience, what I know is ever-changing. Home is ever-changing. 

The setting of my debut novel, Even As We Breathe, drove plot almost entirely. Cherokee is both in such close proximity to Asheville—and so vastly different—that I became fascinated with exploring how a character, in this case a young Cherokee man named Cowney, could navigate these spaces during WWII America. I wondered what would happen when a Native American man, whose own citizenry rights were often ambiguous, shared a space with foreign diplomats who were being considered prisoners of war. How could these comparative places—Asheville and Cherokee—provide a microcosm with which to analyze class, race, and citizenship?

When I consider myself an Appalachian writer, somewhere in the back of my mind I am aware that the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Georgia all the way up to the state of my first story’s setting. Over the 1,000 miles in between are over a million stories. I’ve been asked if it bothers me to be considered an Appalachian writer, as if it limits the scope of my work in some way. In truth, Appalachia is not a singular voice of a singular stagnate community. It’s a literary ecosystem all its own. Even after all of these years, it is still a largely unknown biome. Just as an ecologist or geologist spends her life’s work literally unearthing the complexities of our natural world in a tiny gridded space, grappling with the stories of Appalachia is a means for understanding the larger truths of humanity—something most writers strive to do. 

My voice will always be of this place, even if I one day spend my time digging clams and eating lobster rolls in Maine. There is plenty of important work left to be done right here.

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About the Author

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, lives in Qualla, North Carolina. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. 

After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, she returned to teaching English and Cherokee Studies at Swain County High School. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies, and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.